How we increased the sales of an Ecommerce business from €15k to €31k per month [+ Bonus Templates]

Introduction

Today I want to show you how a group of 4 hyped-marketers managed to double the sales of an ecommerce brand from €15.7K to €31K within 10 months.

We’ve put a lot of effort into bringing this case study to life. To be honest, 10 months of endless marketing strategies have been recorded in this article (which was constantly updated as we were composing it). We fully analyse our strategies, methodologies and tools we used in order to achieve the results.

Let’s start with some proof. Below you can see the the sales’ growth graph from August 2019 to Jun 2020:

The name of the brand and the domain cannot be disclosed due to Personal Data and contract protection. However, the procedure will be explained as it was implemented with the use of examples. The products belong to the category of camera accessories.

Our goal from the beginning was to prove that while Paid Advertising could definitely help with Product Validation, during the scaling phase you can and should exploit every mean and channel available. More specifically, we dealt with:

• Website Development to ensure a qualitative and seamless experience for our users
• SEO & Content Marketing to get more targeted traffic
• Email Marketing for “money on autopilot” by building & utilizing our list
• Google Ads for paid targeted traffic
• Facebook Ads for increasing sales targeting cold, warm & hot audiences

Below we explain in full detail all the actions we did and that you can also use in your own strategy.

It’s going to be a long analysis, so we suggest having a coffee! ☕️

Planning our Strategy

What has already been done

The brand owner, had already done his preparation over the past 2 years and achieved the following:

• Become known on Facebook Groups & online communities.
• Build collaborations with various acknowledged bloggers that posted reviews of his products.
• Gather engaged & passionate audiences around his brand.
• Develop an email list (2.800 people).

What did he gain from all these?

1. Trust and brand awareness by both professional and amateur photographers, hence a Brand’s trust.
2. Referral traffic by bloggers due to word-of-mouth. Bloggers have not only given detailed reviews on their blogs, but they have also created YouTube videos. Of course, this resulted in many backlinks of high DR (Domain Rating) and Brand Awareness. Later on, we will see how this contributed to our Off Page SEO strategy.
3. Recurring purchases & Upsells from his audience through email newsletters.

Focusing on the next steps

Given the situation, we proceeded together with the next steps:

• Creation of a well-designed and functional website from scratch, emphasizing on products and setting goals for an easy Customer Journey. Since the product is in the photography niche, the product’s photos should stand out in the best possible way.
• Technical, On Page SEO & Content Marketing to increase organic traffic.
• Email Nurturing Flows to maximize revenue from our mailing list on autopilot.
• Google Ads to increase Google paid traffic, as there were plenty buyer-intent keywords.
• Facebook Ads for more sales. Under different circumstances, we would go for Brand Awareness or Post Engagement, but we exploited the “full” srategy, and it paid off.

Timeline

The truth is that it might sound easy but in reality, we focused on only one channel for 1-2 months, and then we would test the next one.

Why?

For 2 reasons:

1. Because we wanted to know the results of each activity or action without losing our focus on it.
2. Because a task is always being done much better when you invest time and energy into only 1 thing at a time. We believe that every single thing must be implemented properly from the beginning in order to get the best possible result with the least possible effort, and then to optimize it.

Phase 1: The Website

The website was built on our favorite Shopify. As much as I love Shopify and its advantages, I will always go for flexibility.

So we ended up to WordPress, and therefore to WooCommerce.

There are other solutions, for sure, but we won’t go into details now.

Setup

Our first thing to do was to choose the right hosting provider. One of Google’s first criteria is speed, and particularly the server that hosts the website. That is why we went for a web host with very good & fast resources, capable of supporting an ecommerce website. Another goal was the shop’s security so we made sure that the hosting server was very secure while we also implemented a few critical security protocols.

Tip: We always start off with SSL and https:// for:

1. Secure Transactions
2. Transmission of reliability and trust to the visitors
3. Better SEO and better ranking on Google

We primarily used Cloudflare for security and SSL. For development, we used Elementor PRO and Ocean WP, along with the most advanced plugins such as WooLentor – which made our life much easier plenty of times as it provides full customization on how products appear in our home and shop page.

Elementor has raised the bar quite high when it comes to beautiful design, simple development and a clean website.

UI is a big part of this website. However, a good design does not always lead to sales. This should be really clear in our mind before we move on.

Sales will be achieved only through user-friendliness and smooth User Experience (UX) – especially on the mobile version (this is the last time I’m saying this 😂 ). When the website is simple (yet not poor) then it is also effective. We would like for the visitor to find what he wants in 2 clicks and to be directly and easily led to the sale.

Product Page

The shop’s construction included custom designing of the Product Page, according to the standards we studied so far that yield positive results.

Some of them are:

• Clean and professional images
• Distinctive title and price
• Big (not huge 😂) CTA to add to the cart or purchase
• Display of benefits
• Social Proof, meaning users’ reviews

Upselling & Cross-selling

At this point, since the Product Page is completed, we had a small brainstorming thinking:

“How are we going to increase the AOV* in the future?”

A main technique that most of us overlook is that of Upsell and Cross-Sell.

According to the statistics, it is much easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new potential customer.

Photo by EvolvedContact

One of our goals is to sell the most expensive products to our existing customers, the so-called Upsell.

Cross-sell on the other hand, is the technique of suggesting products related to the product that’s already being bought from the customer, that might attract his interest. That can be easily achieved through applying the saying “the customers that bought this product, also bought his:”.

The best would be to combine these two techniques!

 *AOV = Average Order Value

Checkout, Payments & Shipping

Concerning the payment methods, the shop only had PayPal therefore on the basis of our experience, the credit/debit card payment methοd was essential.

We chose Braintree as an interface of the above shop and that resulted in a 50% increase in total sales.

Shipping has always been a primary issue for ecommerce.

In our case, we built a mechanism with rules, including automatic calculation of shipping based on the products’ weight, in Europe and in the Rest of the world, with Fedex/TNT.

We have certainly implemented One Page Checkout. We want an easy and direct journey in order to boost the conversion rate and take advantage of all the benefits from an optimised checkout.

Stack

I’ve been asked several times: ”What kind of plugins do you install?”

Below is a list below of the stack we used:

• Elementor PRO – for page building
• WP Fastest Cache – for caching and less loading time
• Cloudflare – for domain security, SSL and many other advantages
• Advanced Custom Fields – for the creation and appearance of dynamic fields
• JetElements by Crocoblock – for functional and beautiful website widgets
• WooLentor – for ecommerce widgets
• Really Simple SSL
• Wordfence Security – for extra security
• Smash Balloon Instagram Feed – to add IG Feed to the homepage
• GDPR Cookie Compliance – for legal compliance / monitoring Cookies
• XT WooCommerce Floating Cart – to view items with a pop-up cart
• YITH Deals for WooCommerce – for the creation of offers (i.e. BOGO etc.)

While for Marketing Stack we use:

• Pixel Caffeine – to integrate Facebook Pixel
• Rank Math SEO – for many and useful SEO related features
• Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics by Tatvic – to integrate Google Analytics with ecommerce data
• Klaviyo – for ecommerce Email Marketing
• Google Tag Manager – to add extra scripts

Our opinion regarding the stack is the following: when the product is good, it will sell. With or without 100 different plugins. The addition of new plugins for extra features will probably result in a lower Conversion Rate (because they cause distractions for the visitors), while at the same time it “burdens” the website’s performance/speed.

As you can see, with the help of the above plugins, the shop makes a monthly turnover of over €28Κ. Thus, we suggest not spending a lot of energy on adding extra plugins.

Architecture

Regarding structure, we should have in mind that it’s a very important factor, for both user’s experience (UX) and Google, which will crawl our website.

This is why we need to pay great attention on how we are going to build our foundation, namely:

• SILO Structure
• Minimum Clicks-to-Product
• Easy Permalinks
• Breadcrumbs
• Pagination

Starting off with a SILO structure, at first we should categorize our products in a simple and understandable way.

This helps in the following 2 points:

• The user finds the desirable product in less than 3 clicks from the moment he visits the homepage (Clicks-to-Product)
• Google distributes properly and efficiently the SEO Juice when you gain backlinks (mostly on the homepage) because it detects a clear and equally shared structure.

Let’s see the example of Abercrombie’s website structure:

From the homepage when clicking “Women” we see the subcategories:

Then we click on “Suit” and we see all the products within that subcategory.

Therefore, having done only 2 clicks, we found what we were looking for!

Finally, (even though it is mentioned below) the URL is quite “clear”.

This type of permalink’s structure contributes a lot to On Page SEO. Overall, this is how we would like the structure to be:

domain.com/shop/category/subcategory/product

Regarding Pagination, we should make sure that every page includes a Canonical tag to prevent any possible duplication (if a URL parameter is used). Otherwise, the right form of URL is usually like this: /page/2/, /page/3/ etc.

Phase 2: SEO

SEO and boosting organic traffic are always part of a great strategy. It is now proven that a long-term proper development of the Organic Channel will result to sales, from new or recurring customers.

In our case, we had to do the following:

1. Audit: to find out the current SEO status of the website
2. Keyword Research: to find keywords with great monthly search, low difficulty and buying intent
3. On Page SEO: revamping the whole content and SEO elements (products description, categories, titles etc.)
4. Content Marketing: production of new blog content and distribution to various channels

Audit & Technical SEO

Due to the fact that the development part was done by me and my team, we knew that some specific technical issues would be implemented properly from the beginning. 

Nevertheless, I always perform a check in and out of the website, and in particular:

📱 Mobile Friendly: Mobile friendliness in 2020 should not even be mentioned but because we still see several shops that don’t give any attention to this, we place it as #1.

🚫 404 Checker: with Screaming Frog we found any pages that lead to a 404 error and we redirect them to category pages.

🖋 Titles & Metas: Ideally, we would like to have optimised titles and meta descriptions for all the pages, and mainly the money pages (in our case it’s the product pages). There should be one H1 per page, and should include the keyword (duuuh).

📑 Duplicate Content: with tools like Copyscape we detect duplicate content, and remove/replace it.

⚡️ Speed: It has such a major role nowadays. It is necessary for the website to load in less than 3”. This is where we need (mostly) a powerful server, compressed images, caching, minification and not so many plugins that burden the website.

🔍 Organic Keywords: with Ahrefs we download a list of the existing organic keywords; keywords that place the website in search results. There are always opportunities here. We will analyze this later on.

🔗 Backlinks: We find out the referring domains and their backlinks, as well as if there is anything suspicious, we use the Disavow tool.

📈 Analytics Check: We make sure that Google Analytics is integrated properly and sales are tracked correctly. We do the same with Facebook Pixel for which we use Pixel Caffeine.

⚙️ Structured Data, Sitemap & Technical SEO: RankMath is always a part of our Stack, which undertakes the set up of all the technical SEO settings needed such as structured data, sitemap, on page check, redirections, OG and many more. 

For sure there are many more points to be checked during auditing, however these are the ones we consider as basics.

Off Page SEO

Through a backlinks’ analysis using Ahrefs we got to see that the website had more than enough backlinks by High DR domains worldwide.

With a careful look we noticed that the owner – unintentionally – had trusted people and collaborations that are based on really strong websites concerning Authority.

And why did that help us practically, apart from the referral audience?

Backlinks’ quality lies in the relevance between the content and the anchor link of the domain and us, something that is supported by Google, and studied by the experts.

So, with more than 1Κ high relative backlinks from bloggers, experts, brands etc., backlinks were of excellent quality.

Thus, ultimately, we decided that the Off-Page SEO should stay on hold as it was already on good levels and was not in need of any direct reinforcement.

Keyword Research

A primary process that many people overlook, and even more refuse to think about.

We’d say that it’s the worst nightmare for many marketers.

That is Keyword Research.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is the process of finding and analyzing keywords that help us appear into search engine results.

Basically, we are looking for low competition keywords with a great* monthly search volume.

* Great is subjective and depends on how high is the business’ value of these particular keywords. It’s not necessary to have more than 20.000 searches to be considered as great. Long-tail keywords with smaller search (i.e. 100/month) have proven to bring better results.

Getting Started

The ultimate tool we use is Ahrefs.

Ahrefs contains the biggest database of keywords along with their statistics, and more specifically:

• Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty
• CPC
• Traffic (estimated)
• Position (check the rank of a specific keyword)
• URL
• SERP 

Keyword Clusters

Moving on, we detected 2 general categories regarding the kind of keywords we should be looking for:

1. Website’s Existing Organic Keywords
2. New Keywords

👉 The 1st scenario’s procedure is simple:

We head to Ahrefs to download the list of organic keywords. Right there we detect the following opportunities:

• Keywords of the 1^st page which we want to bring onto the 1^st place
• Keywords of the 2^nd-3^rd page that can be placed in the 1^st page with some extra attention, a good plan and some effort. Of course, we focus (mainly) on the keywords with the biggest monthly search and the best business value.
• Keywords of the 3^rd-4^th page that can be brought to the first place with the help of some good content. 

👉 The 2^nd scenario requires some more time to go deeper 😛

Initially, we’ll do some brainstorming on the basis of the products, create a list of ideas and begin a keyword research in Αhrefs. For example, if we make a search for “sports shoes”, we’ll instantly see its statistics as well as other synonyms.

Going to the sidebar -> Phrase Match or Having the same terms, there’s a list of all the synonym keywords as well as their statistics:

Hence, we add more keywords in our list and then separate them, as we said before, in thematic sections. 

A second quite clever way is to check out the competition. There’s no parthenogenesis, so why not take advantage of the fact that we can use the keywords used by our completion?

So, when looking for a domain related to our business, i.e.https://www.newbalance.com, we notice the following:

243 thousand keywords! There’s definitely something good in there!

If we filter keywords a little bit and go for the “easy” ones, we’ll see several useful and worthwhile keywords!

Obviously, what we said before is now verified, that long-tail keywords can be quite useful in our Keyword Strategy.

How to choose keywords

So far so good! We have found a variety of keywords, and we are now ready to start the selection. What are the criteria though?

Personally, in this particular project (but also in general) we proceeded on the basis of 4 criteria:

• Monthly Search Volume, we want it to be somewhere between 80 to 1000 (and more, if that is something we can support)
• User Intention, meaning the keywords used in search engines by someone who wants to buy something or is doing a market research (i.e. the price of Adidas black trousers Vs Adidas trousers)
• Difficulty, to know exactly if we can achieve ranking easily or not
• Keyword Relevance with the product, we want to be 100% certain that the keyword is directly related with the product

Lastly, for this particular shop, we found extra keywords that contributed a lot in the blog content.

On Page SEO

The next step is to make the best use of the (now) categorized keywords and do the proper On Page Optimisation, that is the optimisation of the existing pages (Homepage, Categories, Products etc.).

Basics of the On Page Optimization

There are a number of factors and points to pay attention to, each time we do the On Page Optimisation. The 3 basic ones are:

• Title
• Meta Description
• Content

More specifically on the Product Page:

• The title is descriptive and includes the main keyword. For example: “Black Iron Straightener – Straighten your hair”.
• The meta description is up to 160 characters, includes the main keyword and, of course, is eye catching, for example: Limited time offer on our black iron straightener. Grab yours now and take your haircut to the next level!
• For the description, we wrote down a unique and enriched text of more than 300-400 words (although we would definitely like it to be longer). We certainly included the main keyword, maybe a bullet list, benefits & features as well as customers’ reviews.
• We used LSI keywords, which are synonyms of the main keyword and long-tail keywords.
• The permalink should be as short and clear as possible.  Maintaining the form: example.com/category/product , for example: domain.com/hair/black-iron-straightener
• Alt text on images, it’s kind of quaint but even today there are many marketers who don’t do this even though it’s so easy to get to the 1^st place having done the right image optimisation. This is where you should pay attention so that the photos’ size does not exceed ~180kb.
• We always make sure to do internal linking! That is to connect pages using the correct anchor links. The good thing about ecommerce is that this is often being done automatically through the sidebar or the related products. Apart from that, all the blog posts (ToFU content) contain internal links to the products.
• We carried out the Product Review Schema using RankMath which was tested with the help of Structured Data Testing Tool. This helped us a lot with Rich Snippets in the search results.

While in the Category Page:

• The title is descriptive and includes the main keyword. For example: “Hair Accessories – Grab our latest deals”.
• The meta description is also descriptive and eye catching, including the parent keyword, for example: “Get our best hair products today. Check out our latest offers and get FREE shipping on all orders above 50€”.
• On each Category Page we also include a description of 300 words. We certainly include here the main keyword as well as the LSI & long-tails.

Content Marketing

SEO does not stop on the On Page neither on the Off Page.

This is our foundation.

Now we continue with a constant production of genuine and quality content.

As far as blogging is concerned, we maintain a specific strategy based on Topic Clustering.

For example, we did the following grouping for a gym:

🏋️‍♀️ Workout Exercises, using topics such as:

• Abdominal
• Yoga
• Running
• Children
• Beginners

And then…

🥘 Nutrition, using topics such as:

• Carbohydrates
• Nutritional Supplements
• Proteins

Similarly, we also used clusters to design a strategy about Blog Content.

BONUS

In order to simplify this process, you can download our FREE Content Strategy Google Sheet here.

We matched 1:1 the keywords with topics/titles and started writing.

As far as content length is concerned, we are often being asked:

“How many articles do I have to compose each month?”

Our answer to this is: Until you achieve your goal! Meaning:

1. Until the keyword is placed in the desired position or
2. Until you gain the targeted traffic or
3. Until the revenue earned through organic traffic is worthwhile and consistent

This means that you might need 1 or 10 articles, or even more!

Blog Content On Page Optimisation

We surely follow all the rules of the on page optimization:

• Title, should be (unique) H1 and include the main keyword
• Simple, comprehensive and eye-catching Meta Description that includes the main keyword
• Use of the main keyword at a rate of 1-1,5%, in the first 100 words and in the H2 titles
• Clean permalinks, i.e. domain.com/blog/post-article-title
• Insert media such as photos or videos with the use of alt text
• Internal linking between articles as well as on products and product’s categories
• External linking on sources being mentioned

Content Promotion

Lastly, let’s not forget the golden rule of Content Marketing:

20% Production but 80% Distribution

For each published article, we distributed it to:

• Owned Media (Facebook, Instagram, Newsletter)
• Earned Media (Communities, Groups, Forums)
• Paid Media (Facebook ads, Banners etc.)

Phase 3: Email Marketing

A great chapter of our strategy is Email Marketing.

Even though we are great fans of Klaviyo, Mailchimp was the easy solution for our case; another proof that tools are not a defining factor, strategy is.

When we got started with Email Marketing in November 2019 our email list had ~2,770 subscribers.

So far (August 2020), our list now contains more than 6,600 people.

Meanwhile each email newsletter produces a great number of revenue:

Setting up our Campaigns

We have 2 types of emails:

1. Automated Email Flows
2. Manual Campaigns (also called broadcasts)

The first type is the automated emails that are being set up once and then are continuously sent to the correspondent segment while the manual emails (you guessed it right) are the ones we create and send out manually.

We always suggest getting started with automated flows as they’re perfect for a good start on email marketing. As soon as they start operating, they produce money on auto-pilot. 💸💸

Automated Email Flows

The email automation flows we set up were less than five but were implemented with a very specific strategy & copy. These are the flows we created:

1. New Customer Email Flow

Perhaps the simplest email created automatically by the system (mostly).

Of course, the default email was not enough for us so we send a thank-you (personal) email with a discount coupon for the customer’s next purchase.

This way we give away the solidity of a serious brand, and at the same time we make sure the customer makes a future purchase by using the coupon.

2. Welcome Discount Email Flow

The concept is simple. We offer a 15% discount for new visitors on their first purchase. That’s how we keep their emails for future use while we also increase revenue. It is a fairly common practice.

But!

We don’t rely only on 1 email.

After the first email – which includes the coupon – is sent, two more emails follow to let the customer know how the brand was created in a very personalized and friendly manner. Secondly another email goes out to them including some real-life testimonials from happy customers. Right here is where we certainly continue the flow and include blog posts, further emails with surveys for better segmentation etc.

This particular flow has brought us an income of more than €9K.

Popup Tip: We created the pop-up using Elementor integrated with Mailchimp. If you are using Klaviyo or some other platform not supported by Elementor, then go for Zapier.

3. Abandoned Cart Email Flow

Our favorite flow!

This is a series of emails reminding people that they abandoned their cart to complete their purchase.

It has been noticed that at least 60 – 70% of visitors abandon their cart, leaving too much money in the cart. It is our duty to convert them.

As shown below, we managed to gain at least €8K more from those people.

What does a flow look like?

It starts with an email being sent 1 to 4 hours after the abandonment.

Then, a 2^nd email follows, 24 hours later, where we prefer to give away a coupon of 10-15% discount in order to “win” the purchase.

Usually, we compose a 3^rd email that’s being sent 3 days later.

4. Win Back Customers Cart Email Flow

Here, we are referring to individuals that haven’t bought anything for over 90 days (of course that’s possible even for fewer days than that) encouraging them to proceed to another purchase. Since they know the brand now as well as the product’s quality, making a sale here is not that difficult. Using a discount coupon is not necessary but, in this case, we did include one.

Goal: Boosting Lifetime Value (LTV) of our customers

5. Post Purchase Review Email Flow

A quite simple email received by the customers 30 days after the purchase in order to post a testimonial about the product they purchased.

This way, we manage to constantly (and automatically) get positive reviews on the product’s page gaining some further social proof. Surprisingly, we had a few more purchases.

6. VIP Customer Cart Email Flow

This is a flow addressed to people who have done a certain amount of purchases (i.e. over 500€) offering them a rewarding discount coupon (usually 20%) or free shipping or X€ discount in their next purchase.

Manual Campaigns

For Newsletters, we kept the rule of quality > quantity and this secured us a steady and increasing revenue each month.

We send 2 emails/month with a minimal style and design in combination with a specific announcement or offer.

For better planning, we pre-plan on the calendar the 2 monthly topics, to prepare the content.

A few examples are:

🔥 New Product Announcement

🖤 BFCM Offers

🎅🏻 Christmas / New Year’s Offers

🙌 Shop Anniversary Offers

🎉 Giveaways

BONUS

Easily schedule your email campaigns by downloading our FREE Email Marketing Calendar template here.

Phase 4: Google Ads

For sure, Google Ads could not be left out of our strategy.

Starting in November 2019 and since the whole project started from scratch and without any historical data, we decided that we were going to implement a testing phase plan for 4-6 months in order to evaluate the performance, and then proceed to scale.

Thus, within a few months, we managed to have the following results:

• Revenue: 53.900€
• CPA: 12,06€
• Spent: 4.620€
• ROAS: 11,6 – that is 11 and a half times our money back!

Research

The keywords we decided to target belong to the following categories:

1. Branded Keywords
2. Product Relevant & Long-tail Keywords
3. Competitors

As per budget we started with a small budget of 500€ ad spend per month.

With the budget we had, we began to target the most relevant keywords, and once we optimised them, we tested some broad keywords with higher search volumes.

Hence, we basically started with exact and phrase match keywords to measure performance and later on we tested modified broad keywords.

Reminder for the different kind of keyword types:

Setup & Optimisations

For Branded Keywords:

Part of our budget was invested on branded terms since we noticed that our competitors were aiming to our brand name, in order to steal customers that were looking for us.

Our goal here is to be #1 in search results, so that our users would continue to visit our site and buy from us.

About Product Relevant & Long-tail Keywords:

We then moved on to keywords directly related to our products, and our goal was to give to the user exactly the product he was looking for – the moment he was looking for it.

We created ad groups for the basic subcategories of our products in order to write a specific copy for specific keywords.

Some of our ad groups contain one keyword (technique known as SKAG – Single Keyword Ad Group).

Our purpose with SKAG is to make a very special copy on the ad according to the keyword searched by the user. This is how we achieve better CTR, quality score as well as Conversion Rate.

You can see their format below:

So, we started with the bid strategy of Manual CPC, performing some tests in order to get the best possible ratio between CPC and CPA.

Then, we proceeded with one-month testing of bid strategy Maximize Conversions (suggested by Google itself), to find out what kind of performance we’d had, however in our case, this increased the cost per conversion as well as the CPC.

More specifically, for the testing period running on Maximize conversions bid strategy, we noticed the following:

• Revenue was decreased by 35%
• ROAS was decreased by 55%
• CPC was increased by 106%
• CPA was increased by 80%

Finally, we also activated RLSA ads (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads).

The concept here is to appear in Google search to users who have previously visited our site, and are in search of something related to our products. It seems that our performance is good enough, having a CPA of 22€ and a x5 ROAS.

For the Competitors:

It is worth noticing that we have also tested competitor keywords, however they did not produce the desired ROAS, leading to their deactivation.

Phase 5: Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads have proven to us, plenty of times, that they are able to multiply our sales. Our experience so far in low-price products (up to €50) has shown us that is quite easy to develop sales.

However, this was the first time we had to deal with products of higher value (> 150€), and at first, we were quite skeptical about it.

We set forth using our methods well-known to us, and eventually got excellent results.

In just 5 months we managed to get the following results:

• Revenue: 34.892,16€
• CPA: 14,77€
• Spent: 3.796,81€
• ROAS: 9.19 – that is 9 times our money back! 

Let’s check out in detail the steps we followed.

Research – Audience & Interests

The most significant of all in Facebook advertising is data.

What needed to be done was to analyze our data in order to fully understand the audience and extract insights for our research. The audience is probably the most important element to achieve high performance advertising. What we did was to explore the audience that was interested in this business.

Once our research and analysis was completed, we ended up to the conclusion that our audience’s age is 30+, it would be only men and their interests would be only those related to the business and the product.

Targeting Tip

We usually try to do some flex targeting, that is interest narrowing to Engaged Shoppers, but here we avoided that as Pixel already had a lot of Purchase events.

Audience Tip

Use Connectio to research interest and copy-paste the list with all the interests.

Setup

Since our goals were:

1. to boost conversions and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and
2. to decrease CPA (Cost per Acquisition)

we focused on the best targeting, not too narrow targeting though. We needed to leave some room to help Facebook do a better optimization on our adsets.

The strategy we set up at the beginning was designed to collect data so that we could use it for a better optimization of our ads.

1. We created a funnel campaign having conversions as an objective, though not the “Purchase” event. Remember, our goal was to collect data as cheap as possible. The events used here were View Content, Add To Cart & Initiate Checkout.
2. Along with this campaign, we created one more campaign with the sole purpose to display ads to those who completed one of the above events.
3. Most of our ads were Dynamic Carousel from a catalogue we prepared and connected to our Business Manager.
4. Our starting budget was 500€ per month which was growing as the results got better.

Retargeting Strategy

Having created our campaign with ad sets aiming to collect data, we created one more campaign targeting solely on sales.

Therefore, our campaign was consisted by only 1 adset, in which we implemented the following:

1. Our target: Since we wanted this adset to generate sales we chose the “Purchase” event.
2. Our audience: Our audience could not be other than the one that had previously interacted with the brand. So, we created a Custom Audience that included those who added one or more products in the cart the last 20 days, and of course, we excluded those who completed a purchase. Since one of our campaigns was collecting data, the second (retargeting) campaign was aiming to convert visitors and cart abandoners into customers.
3. For our creative: For the ad creative of the retargeting campaign, we went for Carousel and dynamic catalogue of products.
4. About the ad copy: The ad copy was reminding to the audience that they had forgotten something in their cart, and it was providing a discount code they could use during checkout in order to get a 15% discount on their purchase.

Coupon Tip

Install Woo Coupon URL in order to create coupons via URL. This way, the user will be able to purchase the product with the discount already applied.

Retargeting Campaign Results (5-month Conversion Window):

• Revenue: 15.738€
• CPA: 10,35€
• Spent: 1.242€
• ROAS: 12.67

Optimisation

You should know that Facebook campaigns are never steady in performance. Performance always drops!

Ad sets & ads need constant optimisation, new strategies, new and creative copies based on the audience analysis. Hence, every week we would analyze collected data and optimise our campaigns according to the following 4 levels:

1. Targeting/Audience
2. Creative
3. Copies
4. Budgeting

Having gotten some feedback from the results of our first month, we proceeded to a breakdown of our adsets analyzing:

• Countries
• Age
• Gender 
• Location

that paid off the most.

Regarding the second month, since we already had an idea, we chose to manually optimise our ad sets aiming particular countries that interacted more with the brand. We applied the same method for the age and location.

Facebook gave us the results we wanted but it also dropped the ROAS since the audience was small and took out our ad sets as “Learning Limited”.

Therefore, we had to maneuver in order to restore the brand to its initial levels and even higher, and that’s why we chose to create a campaign on the basis of allowing Facebook to proceed to its optimisation so that it will receive even more data.

So, we created an ad set that was targeting people worldwide that were certainly interested in the product (specific interest), an audience of about 3.500.000, using Dynamic Images (No Carousel or auto-generated from the catalogue)

The results of this adset:

• Revenue: 4.821€
• CPA: 11,55€
• Spent: 369€
• ROAS: 13.04 – this is 13 times our money back!

Putting it all together

In conclusion, the brand grew and continues to grow as we set new goals together and new records. The results so far are giving us the certainty and confidence we need for more scaling.

In the future, there’s definitely going to be a need for more fine-tunings & optimisations:

• on Facebook Ads & Google ads with more copies & creatives.
• more email flows regarding particular segments that will be created.
• SEO, on the other hand, is something that brings slow but steady results and for sure will be in need of more content.

The goal of WEDOHYPE is not only to help individuals that own a business but also to be transparent and honest regarding our results.

For those who want to find out more or have any questions, feel free to contact us with an email to [email protected] or book a meeting.